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  • Constructing Meaning in the Spanish and French New Novel: Juan Benet and Alain Robbe-Grillet
  • Jorge Muñoz Ogáyar
Sánchez, Francisco Javier . Constructing Meaning in the Spanish and French New Novel: Juan Benet and Alain Robbe-Grillet. New York: Edwin Mellen P, 2009. 206 pp.

Juan Benet and Alain Robbe-Grillet's works are complex. Their works, although always interesting and unique, are often challenging and sometimes frustrate readers. These writers had no intention to produce best-sellers but, rather, personal and self-referential novels. Titles such as Volverás a Región (1967), Una meditación (1969) and Un viaje de invierno (1972) by Benet, or Les gommes (1953), Le voyeur (1955) and La jalousie (1957) by Robbe-Grillet exemplify the core of these writers' production and are essential to understanding the literary movement of which they are main representatives: the Spanish Nueva Novela and the French Nouveau Roman.

Francisco Javier Sánchez's masterful work presents its readers with an in-depth look at the novels mentioned above. The purpose of this study is made clear at the very beginning by the author: "My main goal is to delineate both the similarities and differences inherent in their fiction" (1). And this is exactly what Sánchez does throughout roughly the next 200 pages. The main point of his analysis is to show how these novels, in spite of their inherent experimental quality, were more than just mere superfluous experiments. They were the authors' way to tell the reader of the interaction between language and reality, and how reality, in order to exist (or not) relies on language. Full of meaning, though deprived of realism, Robbe-Grillet's writings portray reality as a blank canvas and let language do with it as it pleases: reconstruction, deconstruction, alteration of a certain given reality, all this is at the core of Robbe-Grillet's work. For Benet, the relationship between language and reality is of a more inquisitive nature, and serves the author to dig deeper in post Civil War Spain and the many complexities of the Francoist regime.

Throughout his book, Sánchez argues that what really defines these authors are not their similarities (a rejection of Realist literature for example) but their differences, both stylistically and thematically. Sánchez concludes his study by highlighting the provisional and unsatisfactory process of constructing meaning, which is what these two authors struggle to achieve in their respective works.

Francisco Javier Sánchez's book is very well structured and his views are effectively argued. It is also required reading for anyone interested in the narratives of the Nueva Novela or Nouveau Roman. It is most definitely a very welcomed, refreshing and important contribution to the field of comparative studies. [End Page 100]

Jorge Muñoz Ogáyar
Auburn University
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